iTunes
Patreon
SpotifyThe evangelical message for girls was all about virginity, naivete, and silence, and millenial women are paying the price for it. “She Deserves Better” gets into what went wrong but also gives us a playbook for how to do better.
We talk about:
- the impact of modesty teaching
- what happens when girls are told they talk too much
- the importance of sex ed
Partner with us to hear Jess and Devi’s trip to a sex shop in Melbourne. We read out product descriptions and give our honest opinion about a (surprising) number of sea creature-like devices. Get it for $3/month (USD).
Show Notes:
She Deserves Better
69: The Big One About Consent
76: Modesty was the Gateway Drug to Purity Culture
114: Let’s Talk About Sex (Education! And Masturbation! And Toys!)
Sheila Wray Gregoire is the face behind BareMarrige.com, the largest single-blogger
marriage blog. She’s also an award-winning author of nine books, including The Great Sex
Rescue, and a sought-after speaker. Connect with Sheila on Instagram
Rebecca Gregoire Lindenbach is a psychology graduate, Sheila’s daughter, and the
author of Why I Didn’t Rebel. Working alongside her husband, Connor, she develops websites focusing on building Jesus-centered marriages and families. Connect with Rebecca on Instagram.
Full Transcript
Devi (she/her):
Sheila and Rebecca. Welcome. It’s so good to have you on the show again.
Sheila and Rebecca:
Yeah, it’s great to be here.
Devi (she/her):
Yes, and Rebecca, this is actually your first time. I am really, really excited to talk to you.
Sheila:
Can I tell you something, Devi?
Devi (she/her):
Yes.
Sheila:
I don’t know if I told you this, but
Devi (she/her):
No.
Sheila:
I was a really late bloomer to the podcast world. Like I didn’t start listening to podcasts for a really long time. And the very first podcast I ever listened to were on a trip I took right before COVID. And it was Rachel Joy Welcher on, Where Do We Go From Here? So you were the very first podcast I ever listened to.
Devi (she/her):
Oh my gosh, I remember you were on a cruise, I think. Am making this up? Yes, I remember. In fact, I have this feeling that this is, it was around this time of year, three years ago that we first talked to you, 2020,
Sheila:
Probably, yeah.
Devi (she/her):
or ish, kind of there about. So yeah, Sheila, I still remember some of the things you said in that first conversation we had. So it’s exciting to have you back, always exciting to have you on. We’re talking today about She Deserves Better, which is a book. The subtitle is Raising Girls to Resist Toxic Teachings on Sex, Self, and Speaking Up. So I actually wanna start with you, Rebecca. What was your experience in evangelicalism on this very topic?
Rebecca:
I had such a weird experience because I was, we were raised in a very conservative Christian space. Right? Like my mom handed me I Kissed Dating Goodbye the minute I turned 13. She paid for my Brio magazine subscription for
Devi (she/her):
Oh BRIO.
Rebecca:
You know, like she was like, we had the whole, we did modesty rules in front of mirrors in the Sears dressing room. Put your hands up, put your hands down, turn around. Like we did all this stuff. And I was in these very, yeah, just these very more legalistic areas, but at the same time at our home, things are very different. So I was in churches who, for example, believed that girls are not able to lead or girls need to be quiet. And I had my youth pastor’s wife would send me messages whenever I had talked too much at youth group that week. And then meanwhile at home, I have… Her, my mom. And anyone
Devi (she/her):
Yeah.
Rebecca:
who knows my mom knows what kind of influence that was, being like, Rebecca, you have a voice. Use your voice. Let’s go. Get louder. So I had the benefit of being that family. But I really did live through the purity culture movement of the early 2000s. I was 11 years old when I first read Brio Magazine online. 11 or 12 years old. And it was just like, whoa, mind blowing. You know, we all ate that stuff up, didn’t we? Like…
Devi (she/her):
Yep. We ate it up. I mean, I loved Brio Magazine. It was a lifeline
Rebecca:
I loved Brio.
Devi (she/her):
for me, actually, this sense of culture. It was my cultural engagement. Like, oh, there’s Christian music artists. Oh, they look pretty. They, you know, they’re wearing makeup. And, you know,
Rebecca:
Mm-hmm.
Devi (she/her):
yeah, absolutely. I get that. Sheila, I think in some ways, like the broad scope of your work is getting at the, you’re getting at the root of… dysfunctional Christian teaching that turns into really scary realities in everyday people’s lives, women, marriages, et cetera. And so when we first started talking to you, it was in the context of how this was working out in marriage. When you started going to the younger years for this book, what were you finding? as far as like does it is it even deeper than just marriage related stuff does it go further back I guess
Sheila:
It does, you know, this one was sadder, honestly, you know, for Great Sex Rescue, which was the first book that we did as a trio. Because we did need all three of us. Joanna Swanski is our statistician. I can’t do stats. I’ve taken a couple of courses, but I can’t do what she does. No, she’s taught stats at the graduate level. She’s done amazing. Yeah, she’s good at this stuff. And you can do survey design. You did our focus groups. You know, I did most of the writing, but we really needed all three of us. And after Great Sex Rescue, where we had really looked at the teachings that were given to women about marriage and sex, you know, we had so many people come into us saying, “I feel free, I feel validated, which is great, but now I don’t know what to do because I grew up with toxic teachings. I don’t want to pass those on to my kids, but I also, I don’t want to tell my 14 year old, go do whatever you want. So like, where’s the happy medium?” And so we did this other survey of 7,000 women and I don’t it’s not that anything we found was surprising. It was just that the strength of the findings was really, it was really stark and really sad. And and speaking to people in focus groups, I think, was really, really hard. Because we heard story after story of date rape, where they didn’t recognize it was date rape, of feeling like you had to marry the first guy you had sex with because now you’re married in God’s eyes and you have soul ties and so they married people that they knew weren’t good for them and that ended up horrific and you just realize like wow did we ever set people up for misery and we did this to children and you know and then and they really paid the price and we did it in Jesus name yeah i think
Devi (she/her):
Yeah.
Rebecca:
it’s always harder when it’s kids right It’s one thing to look at what adult women are hearing and how it’s affecting them. It’s another thing to picture an 11-year-old who hasn’t even gotten her first training bra yet and think about how that’s affecting her. It’s just a whole other level of heartbreak, frankly, because we didn’t only steal our adult years, they also stole their childhood.
Devi (she/her):
Yep, yep. Let’s talk about some of your findings. What was one of the big surprises for you? Or if there was a surprise, what was a big surprise?
Sheila
I think it was the strength of the correlation between modesty and really negative outcomes.
Devi (she/her):
Okay.
Sheila:
So we asked for different iterations of the modesty message because we really wanted to drill down on this. We wanted to figure out how bad the modesty messages are because that tends to be what we hear, right? And I don’t know when this podcast is going live, but right now as we’re recording, it’s the time of the year when all the debates start about two-piece bathing suits.
Rebecca:
Wasn’t it Jacob Den Hollander said as part of the Twitter liturgical calendar, as we all debate bikinis or yoga pants in April and then bikinis in July or something like that?
Sheila:
And David and Basheba in January, whatever it is. Something. So we really wanted to drill down on modesty. So here’s our four messages that we measured. Boys are visual in a way the girls will never understand. A boy can’t help but lust if a girl is dressed like she’s trying to incite it. Girls have a responsibility not to be stumbling blocks to the boys around them with how they dress. And a girl who dress immodestly is worse than a girl who doesn’t. And we left it up to the survey taker to decide what worse meant. And when you take them together, they are so highly linked to horrible things. And when you look at specifically the messages that hold girls at least partially responsible for a boy’s lust, she has a 52% higher chance of experiencing vaginismus if she believes that as a teen. Like that is huge. And vaginismus, and I know I’ve talked about this before with you, but it’s a sexual pain disorder where the muscles of the vaginal wall contract and become really tight, which can make penetration really painful, if not impossible. Women who suffer from it can have trouble even inserting tampons, can have trouble with pelvic examinations with doctors. It just is a really big issue. And evangelical women suffer from it at between two and two and a half times the rate of the general population. Like this is largely
Devi (she/her):
Wow.
Sheila:
our issue, and this is why. Because we are telling girls, you are responsible for boys’ sin.
Devi (she/her):
Yeah.
Sheila:
And they’re also, and just to throw this one in the mix too, they’re also 68% more likely to marry an abuser.
Devi (she/her):
Wow.
Sheila:
So it’s bad. Yeah, it’s bad. And so now when I’m in these debates
Devi (she/her):
And this is from a sample of 7,000.
Sheila:
yes, yeah. So now when I’m in these debates on Twitter, and because whenever these modesty debates come up, people say, well, sure, we shouldn’t blame girls, but let’s remember that we need to be good for the boys too. And you know, it is hard for boys. I say, no, no. Girls do not deserve a 68% higher chance of marrying an abuser just so that boys get temporary comfort. No, girls matter
Devi (she/her):
yep, no, of course. And okay, so 68% higher chance of marrying an abuser. So this ties in a little bit with something you said just a little bit earlier. And Rebecca, feel free to just jump in on some of this stuff as well. You made a comment about girls feeling the pressure to marry someone they had sex with. because of the soul tie, the shame, like we’ve done it anyway, we should just get married. I’d love for you to talk a bit about that. That’s not something we’ve talked about on the show much, and I have a feeling this is such a huge thing for people.
Rebecca:
Yeah, there’s such an emphasis on virginity in so many resources to young girls and so many of the sermons and the things that are said at youth retreats and those huge youth rallies, right? Like we all went to like acquire the fire and know of the name. That’s what they’re called in Canada anyway. I don’t know what they are down the states or in Australia or anywhere. But we went to these huge conferences and there would always be like a keynote speaker on don’t have sex, right? That they’d have the person up there who I had sex and now my life is over. And they would have all that kind of conversation. happening
everywhere. And what happened was we gave a whole generation of teenagers this gospel that said the way that you prove to God that you love him, the way that you are a good person is you are a virgin. Right? And we actually did a really fun little very non scientific study, but just a fun one where we actually compared the most commonly used words in the New Testament versus the resources for teen girls. And in the New Testament is things like glory and like money is really big and you know, Jesus and love, joy, all the things
Devi (she/her):
Yep.
Sheila and Rebecca:
you’d expect. And then in the girls one, it’s just sex massive
across. the page and husband, weight, pure, virgin, like
Devi (she/her):
Wow.
Sheila and Rebecca:
that kind of thing. Anyway, so it’s just interesting how we really did have a whole generation of girls who believed I need to keep my virginity at all cost. I need to stay a virgin. Once I am not a virgin, I am now crumpled up paper. I am
Devi (she/her):
Yes.
Sheila and Rebecca:
a chewed piece of gum, whatever. Insert your purity metaphor here. And what we heard from women was that they would date a guy. you know, and then they’d go too far. And then they’d realize it’s over now. My virginity is gone. And like we said in the book, we said, we taught a whole generation of girls to protect their virginity, but we never taught them to protect themselves, right? So as soon as your virginity is gone, they would just say, I just didn’t feel like I had the right to say no anymore. And so. you know, then they’d have sex when they didn’t want to, or they’d say, I felt like my I had built a soul tie. And, and so yeah, I married the guy. Because even though the relationship wasn’t great, I was like, Yeah, but I’ve already given myself to him. And that’s the cost of emphasizing virginity as a girl’s value. And of course, people say, well, we never did that. We always said that their value was in Christ. But I mean, if I wouldn’t see my, you can’t see my face right now, but I’m giving a face. Because I grew up in this.
Devi (she/her):
Yeah.
Rebecca:
And no, we were not taught that our identity is in Christ. We were taught that your identity is in Christ and that’s why you should be a virgin. And if you’re not a virgin, then you didn’t really put your identity in Christ, now did you? And you weren’t really a good enough Christian. And so I think that what often happens is you have this whole teaching that you’ve been steeped in your whole life. And you’ve never actually been told what to do if you have sex? You’ve never been told how to tell if the sex was consensual.
Devi (she/her):
Right.
Rebecca:
You’ve never been taught how to tell if you’re pushing someone’s boundaries in a bad way. All that said is don’t put it in. Like that’s pretty much it, right? And so then what happens when you have sex you feel well, what have I been taught? I’ve been taught that now I am now I don’t have something to offer. I’ve been told that now I’ve given that my precious gift. I’ve been told that now I have a soul tied to this person. I am married in God’s eyes. And you don’t ask all those other really important questions.
Devi (she/her):
Yep.
Rebecca:
And it was just the root of so many abusive relationships we talked to and so many just toxic relationship spirals where you ended up sleeping with a lot of people you didn’t even really want to, but you felt like the only reason I had to say no to sex is that I’m a virgin. So once you aren’t anymore, what is consent?
Devi (she/her):
Yeah. Of your respondents, what were some of the stories that people shared about getting married to people that maybe in hindsight they don’t think they should have been married to, that they only married because of…
Sheila:
Mm-hmm We heard a lot do you want it you didn’t wear the focus groups? Yeah, I’ll take this need to know yeah, no
Devi (she/her):
Yeah.
Rebecca:
one of the one of the things that really struck me and And and really actually made me think about things very differently in talking to this particular group of women who I did a whole focus group of women who had escaped abusive relationships and are now in very happy ones and Almost every single one. One of the main reasons they stayed with the abusive man, even when they were dating and realized he was bad, was they wanted to save the face. They were taught you have to look like things are put together, right? And then when they were married, instead of getting help immediately when things went bad, they had to look like the perfect Christian wife. You have to be a good witness. You have to be grateful. Don’t grumble, be happy, be kind, right? All these different things. And no one actually allowed them to be honest. because being honest about how someone was failing was labeled as being prideful or selfish. And that’s one of the main reasons why we actually added, we had like one chapter that was supposed to encapsulate a bunch of different things, but we ended up breaking up some stuff. So we have a whole chapter on boundaries. We have a whole chapter on like explaining the importance of self-esteem. And we have a whole chapter on how to recognize tricky people in this book because of that idea that you have to keep up appearances.
Devi (she/her):
Yep.
Rebecca:
Our daughters don’t have to keep up appearances. But with all this purity culture messaging, I mean think about the Josh Harris opening to I Kissed Dating Goodbye, like you’re getting married and all the people you’ve dated before come line up behind you on your wedding day. Is your spouse going to even want you after that? Like, oh my goodness, I sure hope so! Like, that’s not
a good reason to not want someone. But that’s what we were told.
Devi (she/her):
Mm-hmm.
Rebecca:
And so it was so important to save face because you feel like I’ve already crossed the line. If I were to go backwards now, it would be like a divorce.
Devi (she/her):
Yep.
Rebecca:
It would be like a really bad breakup, not a, hey, we’ve been dating for four months and it’s not working out. That was not an option.
And I think, yeah, just that ability to speak truth and not have to save face is so important.
Devi (she/her):
Yeah, yeah, you, I think one section I was surprised to see in here, though, I mean, it completely makes sense, you know, even makes sense. It resonates with my own life experience as a girl, whatnot, is chapter three. She deserves to be heard why emotional health isn’t attained by just telling her to be joyful in the Lord. Sheila, talk a bit about emotional health and why you think it’s important for young women, teenage girls. children even, to be introduced to these ideas.
Sheila:
A lot of Christianity in its modern evangelical format is geared towards gaslighting people out of their genuine emotions. I truly believe that.
We’re told that if you are anxious, it’s because you don’t have faith and you need to have more faith because if you worry, it means you don’t have faith. We’re told that if we are miserable, we will be a bad witness. And the reason that people want to become Christians is because they see how happy we are and how shiny and happy and how amazing our lives are. And so if you ever show any kind of negative emotion, it is a bad witness for Jesus. And then when you combine that with the idea that children need to obey their parents
Devi (she/her):
Yeah.
Sheila:
and that children… it’s selfish, it’s selfish to have boundaries, it is selfish to even to even think about what you need. We end up raising girls to gaslight themselves.
Devi (she/her):
Yep.
Sheila:
And so you think about the verse that’s constantly quoted, the hardest, deceitful and wicked above all things, and who can who can, what is that the hardest to see who can trust it?
and, and I remember being taught that You’re supposed to stand on faith, not on feelings. Because feelings are bad, feelings are fickle. It is faith that is always going to be there because Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And that is actually a distortion of the way that God made us. Because our feelings are very important. It is our feelings which tell us when, you know what? There’s something you need to pay attention to. When you have a spidey sense that you feel creeped out by someone, that’s something that should be paid attention to. Like maybe this isn’t a safe person. When you really, really hate your job, you know, maybe that’s a sign that I’m in a career that I shouldn’t be in.
Devi (she/her):
Yep.
Sheila and Rebecca:
But if we teach our girls to disregard their feelings, then are they going to know that when they are miserable in their job in the future, that this is something that, that actually matters and that they should pay attention to.
Devi (she/her):
Yep. Yeah, or if they’re miserable in a dating relationship, that it’s okay to get out. Like it’s, yeah, yeah.
Sheila and Rebecca:
Exactly.
Devi (she/her):
Hmm, that’s good. That’s really, really good. In terms of, like if we start talking about solutions, so this is an evidence-based book, like your work has been the last few rounds since the great sex rescue. What… are the things at work that you discovered.
Sheila
Well, just a really simple thing is relationship works and talking works. So the more that parents talk to their kids and the more that you have a good relationship with your kids, the better things are. And I think instead what purity culture did especially was it told parents you just need a formula. There is a formula that you can pass on to your kids whereby if they follow this formula they’re going to end up happy in every way and the formula doesn’t work. So let me give you, we’ll give you an example from dating. Do you want to explain our dating, our dating findings? Sure.
Devi (she/her):
Yeah, please.
Rebecca:
Yeah. Our dating findings were interesting because we looked at the, we looked at multiple outcome variables because I mean, those of us who grew up in purity culture, we know there’s only one outcome variable that we ever actually talked about. And they said, were you a virgin on your wedding night? Right? That’s the only one anyone ever cared about. So
Devi (she/her):
Yep.
Rebecca:
we asked about a bunch of them. We asked about, you know, self-esteem in high school. We asked about your rates, whether or not someone had married an abuser. We asked about, yes, whether or not they’d save sex from marriage. That’s an interesting data point as well. We asked about if they got married ever.
Devi (she/her):
right.
Rebecca:
We asked about- Marital and sexual satisfaction. Thank you, marital and sexual satisfaction. We asked about a bunch of different things. And then we ran stats to see how each dating category ranked. And we had four categories. We had- whether or not they were allowed to date and then whether or not they actually dated. So that ended up with four categories. So like not allowed to date, didn’t date, not allowed to date, did date, were allowed to date and dated and were allowed to date and did not date.
Devi (she/her):
Okay.
Rebecca:
Okay, so there are like four categories. And depending on what you’re looking at, it’s not across the board positive or negative.
Devi (she/her):
Okay.
Sheila and Rebecca:
So there is no one size fits all. There’s not a one size fits
Devi (she/her):
Aha As opposed to some of your other findings, which were across the board, to this is bad, like the modesty teaching.
Sheila and Rebecca:
yes.
Rebecca:
Now, to be completely fair, the not wanting to date and didn’t date, I’m pretty sure that one across the board was the worst. No, not wanting to date, I mean, not wanting to date and did date. So going, yeah,
Devi (she/her):
Okay.
Rebecca:
I think that one, I think that one did badly across the board. But for example, for the most part, you know, being allowed to date and choosing to date did pretty good. except that they had higher rates than those who chose not to date but were allowed to date of marrying an abuser someday. So they had higher rates of ending up with an abusive partner. The people who were allowed to date but chose not to, they did really, really well, but they did have lower chances overall of ever getting married, which is not inherently a negative result,
Devi (she/her):
No, of course not.
Rebecca:
there are a lot of people who want to get married and didn’t, and a lot of it is often because they weren’t given true teachings about how to actually get married,
Devi (she/her):
Right.
Sheila and Rebecca:
right? So one
Devi (she/her):
Or it’s also just demographics. It’s just harder to get married. People are delaying marriage. It’s, that’s kind of international
Rebecca:
specifically with like specifically with that group because that we would see across all the different quadrants, right? So that group compared to the other quadrants had a lower rate of marriage So some of it may have been self-selected because they’re the ones who chose not to date
Devi (she/her):
Okay, I see.
Sheila and Rebecca:
But a lot of it based on the kinds of teachings that we were given in high school I mean how did you hear the princess in the tower dating strategy?
Devi (she/her):
No, oh yes
Rebecca:
Okay,
yeah, I’m sure you did, no, you know what I’m talking about, right? But if you wanna find the right guy, do another devotional in your bedroom.
Devi (she/her):
Yes,
Rebecca:
Yeah, just wait,wait. Just wait. And God will bring him when you’re ready because how many of those women who, their parents are like, you can date if you want to, and they’re like, I’m not going to date because I’m waiting for God’s right man. How many of them are in the never got married but wanted to get married phase?
Devi (she/her):
Sure, sure. I think Jess would say that her experience was she was like, my parents standards are lower than mine. Like, I am so much better than you are. You know, I think that’s one of the things she said before, is that
Sheila:
yeah. And I think what we found too, with so many women in that situation, you know, you feel like you have to turn yourself into a pretzel. It’s almost like you’re treating God like a pagan God who demands sacrifice. So I want God to send me a husband because the only way to get a husband is to convince God that I am worthy of one. And so I’m gonna turn myself into a pretzel to prove to God that I don’t actually want to get married because, and that I love him more than I love the idea of getting married so that God will deem me worthy enough of sending me a husband. And you really get this idea reading Elizabeth Elliot’s Passion and Purity where she is wrestling with how do we deal with the fact that we want to get married and that God may not be enough? Like we have to prove to God that he is enough before he will let us get married. And it’s terrible emotional turmoil. And that really is a view of God that’s very pagan, that he needs to be satisfied. And if your route to marriage is to prove to God that you’re worthy of it, instead of getting involved in volunteer stuff. So I actually meet some people. It’s
Devi (she/her):
Right.
Rebecca:
not the best strategy. Just getting someone’s phone number, just getting a guy’s phone number, being like, hey, you wanna grab coffee sometime.
Devi (she/her):
Yeah.
Rebecca:
And I think that’s what, when we’re looking at those. results that are sometimes different across the different experiences, the takeaway is not that we’re looking for a new formula. The takeaway is that we’re looking for the foundational truth that we can then apply to our individual situations. Right?
Devi (she/her):
Okay, so what are some of the foundational truths then that you discovered? Rebecca, I think you are the mom of a daughter. Is that right?
Sheila and Rebecca:
I am.
Devi (she/her):
You are, yeah. So for you, what were some of the foundational truths that you took away that you thought, think, that you took away in the context of, I’m going to do this with my own daughter?
Rebecca:
Yeah, I think one of the big ones is just encouraging your daughter to have a voice even when people don’t want her to. I think that’s a really big one. Like standing up for herself and speaking up and recognizing that if she’s in an environment where other people want her to be small, she’s going to experience that pressure and probably internalize it to a certain degree. And one of the things that looking at all the data that I want to be able to do for my daughter as she grows up is just teach her how to trust the still small voice in her heart and not gaslight herself to thinking that she’s more easily deceived because she’s a girl. Not think that my job is to make boys feel comfortable. No, your job is to serve Jesus. Just like the boy’s job, you have the same job. The job is just to serve Jesus and that trick goes over into so many different things but teaching, yeah, just trusting that still small voice, encouraging her to listen to her intuition, even if it goes against what I would do in a situation. I remember when I was 15 years old, I confronted a youth leader about some stuff that was happening at youth group that was genuinely inappropriate and especially as a parent now, I’m like, oh my goodness, I cannot believe that happened. And I’m sorry that I didn’t take better care, but yes. No, you know, it’s part of my origin story. It’s fine. But my dad… is much less confrontational than I am, right? And so I’m this tiny scrawny 15 year old being like, dad, I’m gonna call my youth leader and I’m gonna confront him about these things. And he was like, I just, and he supported me. I knew that he wasn’t necessarily agreeing that it was the right thing to do, but he sat on my bed in the very room that we are recording in. He sat on my bed while I called my youth leader who was like a 40 something year old man and told him that I was uncomfortable and that what he was doing was inappropriate. By the end of the conversation, my dad was fully on my side because he did not know everything that was going on. But that’s the kind of thing that parents can do. I knew that my dad didn’t necessarily agree or would take the same steps that I had, but he supported me. And he was there because he knew that me learning to stand up and to speak up was really important.
Devi (she/her):
Yep.
Rebecca:
And I think that’s such a good model because I think that often we also believe that we have to always agree with our kids. And that’s absolutely not the case. But I think that just looking at where can we support our children and how they are learning to listen to God’s prompting and let’s not quell the spirit in them. Let’s not stand in the way. Let’s not think, well, she’s only 14, what can she know? And instead give them a chance to actually work that out because there are so many places, especially for our young girls. that will actively be working against their ability to do that. So let’s as parents make sure we’re not one of them.
Sheila:
Yeah, you know, one of the funniest findings that we had was on the teaching girls talk too much. So we asked women, when you were a teenager, did you believe the girls talk too much? And do you believe it now? Yeah.
Devi (she/her):
100% was told that as a child
Sheila:
51% of women said yes, as a teenager, I certainly believe that. That’s actually a really good measure of something called internalized misogyny, which is when you women ourselves believe that women should be smaller and are worth less than men. So when you believe that girls talk too much, what you’re really saying is that girls voices are a problem. And we should be letting boys speak more. Brio magazine taught this consistently, they would have these snippets of what boys think about girls and boys were constantly saying girls talk too much.
Devi (she/her):
Talk
Sheila and Rebecca:
The
Devi (she/her):
too
Sheila and Rebecca:
guy
Devi (she/her):
much.
Sheila and Rebecca:
talk section. Yeah. For Young Women Only by Shaunti Feldhahn and Lisa Rice said that as well. They shared boys saying that girls talk too much and they wanted girls to understand this, that you talk too much. When girls believe that as teenagers and then they grow up and they marry someone and they both work outside the home, you’re like over what is it over twice as likely to do all the housework. Like, it’s amazing the correlations here. So when you believe that girls talk too much, you end up doing more of the housework when you’re an adult. And
Devi (she/her):
Wow.
Rebecca:
My responsibility is to cater to the men in my life and make their lives easier. I need to take up less space. Yeah.
Devi (she/her):
Yep.
Sheila:
And now the question is, of course, do girls talk too much? Because if girls talk too much, if girls genuinely do talk too much, then it makes sense to believe that girls talk too much. And so we’ve been taught forever that girls do indeed talk too much. James Dobson started it in 1983. He wrote a book called Love for a Lifetime where he made the claim that, I think it’s like women say 50,000 words a day compared to men’s 25,000. And the message was, so ladies, when he gets home from work, he’s already said all of his words, but you haven’t said hardly any of yours. And so your tendency is gonna wanna be to talk his ear off and you need to be quiet and let him have his time because your voice is a problem.
Devi (she/her):
Yep, I’ve heard that.
Sheila:
that yeah, this was followed up. Gary Smalley did. I think Gary Smalley said like 25,000 words to 12,000 words. I could have those mixed up.
Rebecca:
But again, everyone makes the numbers up so much that it doesn’t actually matter what numbers are all made up.
Devi (she/her):
Oh.
Sheila:
There were no citations anywhere. And then when researchers are seeing this as being it’s all over, it’s all over magazines, it’s all over books. And it started with Dobson more or less, but researchers looked into it and actually measured it. There are there is no statistical difference between the number of words. that men and women say in a given day.
Devi (she/her):
Wow.
Sheila:
We say the same number of words, except when we’re in a mixed group, at work, at church, whatever. And when you are in a mixed group, women do not say their fair share of words until there are at least 80% female.
Devi (she/her):
Wow.
Sheila:
So if there’s anything less than 80% female, men will say more than their fair share of words. So the problem is not the girls talking. too much. The problem is that girls don’t speak up enough and that we diminish women’s voices.
Devi (she/her):
Okay, that has enormous implications for youth group settings and for, you know, families with mixed-gender children, like boys and girls together is what I mean by that. And yeah, it has huge implications. Wow.
Sheila:
Now I do need to say, I do need to say like on an individual basis, it could be that a girl talks more than a boy. Right? Like we’re talking about averages, right? So you could just have a really talkative girl and a boy that’s really quiet or you could have the opposite.
Devi (she/her):
Absolutely, and I would say like my marriage is like that, definitely. We fit kind of that stereotype. But I think what you’re saying though, I think, is this thing of too much, right? Because it’s not women talk more than men. Women talk too much is a different statement from women talk more than men. So too much is now, that’s a value judgment. Because what that’s saying is that there’s a satisfactory level and being feminine means not exceeding that or whatever. And that is, yeah, that is devastating. I can say that as somebody who was told as a girl that I talked too much, that was really, really devastating. Yeah.
Rebecca:
Well, when I was about 14, 15, 16 or something, somewhere around there, when I was like in high school, I was going to a youth group where every week they would have an open mic section where people could come and speak for one to two minutes on something they’ve learned this week, something that happened this week or give a prayer request, something like that. And so me being the person that I am, anyone who lost to the pockets, of course I did it most weeks because especially since I can’t handle awkward silence.
Devi (she/her):
Yes.
Rebecca:
And so like when no one would go up and like, well, for pity’s sake, if someone has to go up, I’ll go up, I’ll figure something out on the fly, right? So that’s what I would do and I’d go up and I never went more than like the two minutes I would sit something quick and then sit back down. But I was always very passionate, very much actually said something that was more than just, I have a test on Friday, can you please pray, right? And what started happening is when I went up quite consistently, especially whenever there was a pause and an awkward break, I started getting messages from my youth leaders, my youth pastor’s wife saying, you know, you share an awful lot and just so you know, like if you’re sharing, it might intimidate the boys and intimidate other people from speaking. So if you could just stop and make sure that you’re really making sure you’re not taking up too much space.
Devi (she/her):
Wow.
Rebecca:
Like, and this is again, I went up when there were awkward pauses because no
one else and I’m just like, you guys, this is, this is flunking guys. Like this is not going well. And also it was pretty evenly split. Who spoke? The boys and the girls.
Devi (she/her):
Yeah.
Rebecca:
Right. And no one was going to the boys and being like, Hey, look, the girls are speaking.
Devi (she/her):
Yep.
Rebecca:
You guys can speak too. It was just, ah, make the girls shut up so that the boys don’t feel.
Sheila:
Yeah. And this is a theme that we saw a lot in the Christian literature to teen girls, especially during purity culture, is that girls were told it is your job to make boys feel good about themselves.
Devi (she/her):
Yep, absolutely.
Sheila:
So, you know, a really good example in the book for young women only, they were talking about how boys require unconditional respect, just like we are taught in marriage that men need unconditional respect. And the way this is defined in for young women only is, you know, deference, you’re not supposed to like challenge them if they say something that seems wrong. Like you’re supposed to express the total confidence that they… can completely handle any situation. You’re supposed to always give them the full benefit of the doubt, even in the face of contradicting evidence. Yeah,
Devi (she/her):
Yeah, this is where with married women, she’s basically like don’t correct their directions, right?
Sheila and Rebecca:
Exactly.
Sheila :
Yeah. And so she does that for teen girls as well. And the unconditional respect is not just due to your boyfriend, but it’s due to any male classmate, any male friend, whatever. And then she says, if you’re looking for a way to figure out if you’ve, if you’ve crossed the disrespect line, watch for anger.
Devi (she/her):
Right.
Sheila:
So if a boy is angry at you, it’s because you’ve disrespected him.
Devi (she/her):
Right.
Sheila:
That is total grooming for abuse.
Rebecca:
Oh, it’s just toxic as anything.
Sheila:
Can you imagine? Because abusive relationships are actually more common in the teenage years than they are in the adult years.
Devi (she/her):
Okay.
Sheila:
Abusive relationships are very serious to teenagers. And imagine telling a teenage girl that if a boy is angry at you, it’s because you did something wrong, as opposed to saying, hey, if a boy is angry at you, that is a red flag. that this is not a safe person to be around, which is what the Bible does
Devi (she/her):
Well, and it’s interesting because you can argue like you could as an adult read something like that and find the nuance in it, depending if you maybe, maybe you could. But I think with a teenager, it’s literally just black and white, right? I’m reading this because I want instruction. I need to be I need to figure out what to do. I need to figure out my relationships. And yeah, if that is it. If this is the explanation for anger, I’m totally at fault. It’s me.
Rebecca:
Well, what I find so particularly offensive, reading through things like, you know, for young women only and like all those kinds of things, like especially for young women only, is so many of the resources that were marketed to my generation of Christian girls were really just, and they’re marketed as Christian. These are the way that we can be a Christian box. Is there so… Shallow.
Devi (she/her):
Yeah.
Rebecca:
Like, I’m sorry, it was just shallow. The entire book for young women only is just how to get boys to like you. There’s nothing actually really about how to be a good Christian other than how to be a good Christian girl who doesn’t accidentally usurp her authority over boys so that boys think that you’re nice and you can date one. Like, it’s really quite shallow and one of the things we’re trying to do in She Does Hers Better is get back to the idea that girls are actually allowed to have a bigger faith than just whether or not boys like them. Like they’re allowed to have a bigger faith than just their relationship status. And it’s just so horrifying that there wasn’t nearly as much actual doctrinal teaching to teenage girls. It was stuff like, secret keeper girls, have you done these modesty tests? And remember, you’re intoxicating, you little eight-year-old, and that’s a whole other thing. And then
Devi (she/her):
Yeah.
Rebecca:
there’s for young women only where it’s like, but do the boys think that you’re pretty enough? And do you think that they’re nice enough? And are you? And make sure that you can get a boyfriend too, just follow these steps. That’s how the book reads. And that was our faith development.
Devi (she/her):
Right.
Rebecca:
Like at least Brio Magazine had devotionals in it. Right? Like
at least it did have some faith stuff, but it’s just, I found that really, really hard watching that and just saying, wow, yeah, we really taught girls that all God wants for you is to be a pretty girlfriend.
Sheila: And this is, this is something that I didn’t realize as a parent raising a child in purity culture. So I did buy, I kissed dating goodbye for Rebecca. We got rid of it. Like by the time she was 16, I totally thrown it out and totally rejected it. But at the time I thought it was a good idea because I grew up in the 80s and everybody was dating and I had
Devi (she/her):
Yep.
Sheila:
a lot of heartache and I thought, hey, this might be a way to avoid it. And we realized pretty quickly that it didn’t work. But my youth group experience was so different than Rebecca’s because I’m a Gen X. And when I remember my small youth group in downtown Toronto, purity culture had not come in, the American conservative movement really hadn’t infiltrated Canada that much yet. And our youth group was focused on like… how do we evangelize our
classmates? How do we spread the gospel? How do we pray for people? We used to pray through the 1040 window, missions around the world, thinking about the unreached people groups. That’s what we were revolving our spiritual life around and doing, reading the Bible, praying, et cetera. And somehow that all changed and I hadn’t realized it.
Devi (she/her):
Yep.
Sheila:
And it was only after my girls were a lot of the way through high school that I’m like, this is so different from my youth group experience.
Devi (she/her):
Yep.
Sheila:
Because something really changed. And when you look at our data and divide it by generations, you can see the effect of purity culture on millennials. And how much worse off millennials were. Millennials had less sex ed than Gen X and Boomer women. They understood consent less than Gen X and Boomer women had. It was bad.
Devi (she/her):
Why? Why did they understand consent less?
Sheila:
because we stop talking about anything other than don’t do it. So in the 80s, we actually had pretty, first of all, everybody dated. Everybody in my youth group dated. We all dated each other. I think I went through most guys in our youth group. You know?
Devi (she/her):
Right.
Sheila:
And so we did have these conversations. Now it wasn’t that much more, but I’m just saying that the idea of consent was completely missing from millennials because we took it out of the conversation. Because if the message that kids need to hear is don’t do it, but we are also giving a message of consent and how to recognize consent, then we’re assuming that there might be a situation where someone might do it. And so it’s very important not to even talk about consent because none of you should be doing it anyway.
Rebecca: Well, we actually heard that. It’s like, why are we talking about that? You shouldn’t be having sex.
Sheila: Well, Cedarville University who got in the news two months ago, Conservative Christian University, when they were trying to explain consent, they didn’t. very badly, but that was one of their things. It seems strange to talk about consent when no one should be doing it, but because of Title IX in the US,
Devi (she/her):
We ave to talk about it. Okay, I wanted to end actually on the sex ed piece. So chapter seven, she deserves to know about her body, why sex ed isn’t the bogeyman you’ve been told it is.
Sheila and Rebecca:
Hehehehehehehehe
Devi (she/her):
So anybody who grew up in the 80s and 90s culture wars knows that sex ed, I mean, similar to what’s happening in some parts of the United States right now, actually, like I’m thinking of Texas and Florida, certain kinds of sex education was considered the ultimate line that public schools crossed into raising children. You’re giving your kids to the public schools, they’re gonna indoctrinate them into this kind of thing. So what did you find were the impacts of the lack of sex education?
Sheila:
Mm hmm. So we gave women a list of 10 words about sex. And we said, how many of these could you identify at the point where you graduated high school? And millennials could identify fewer than the older generations. Interestingly, women across the board were more likely to know the words for male anatomy than they were for female anatomy, which is
Devi (she/her):
Yep.
Sheila:
wow, in and of itself. But the more words you knew, And if you, the younger you were when you knew that a female orgasm existed, and the more you understood consent and date rape, the higher your self-esteem, the lower the likelihood that you would marry an abuser, the lower your chance of having multiple sex partners, like there were no downsides. There were no downsides to more information.
Devi (she/her):
Okay, so let’s talk now in terms of today. You are with a group of Christian parents who are terrified of the sex ed curriculum at their public school. What would you say to them?
Rebecca:
I think what I would say is your kids are at school. They’re going to learn this stuff. They need to be educated. But additionally, you need to be educated for a variety of reasons. I never had sex in high school. I didn’t even date in high school. My first kiss was the man I ended up marrying.
Devi (she/her):
Yeah.
Rebecca:
I was so far out at round, but because I had good sex education, I actually did have good sex education. She thinks she did a bad job. Frankly, you didn’t do a great job, but I took a lot of biology classes in high school. So I
Devi (she/her):
Haha!
Rebecca:
got I got I figured it out Okay, no, but I understood what safe sex meant. I understood what different sex acts were These are the kinds of things that parents don’t often want to talk to their kids about like I don’t want to talk to my kids About what oral sex is versus fingering
versus really but I knew these things And so when my friends came to me who were active and were doing dangerous things I could also point them to people who could help them That’s another thing to sex education isn’t only for your daughter or your child, it’s also so that they can actually help and protect the people that they love. I had so many friends come to me and talk about what they were doing and I was like, you know that’s incredibly dangerous, right? And that’s important.
Devi (she/her):
Yep.
Rebecca:
Cause we’re not only, first of all, knowledge helps, okay? Your kid’s gonna know about these things. If you’re like, well, if I don’t give them sex education, if I don’t talk to them about this, then they shouldn’t have to hear about it. They’re already hearing about it, okay? They’re already hearing about everything. Everyone’s talking about everything. You think 14 years, you think that your kid doesn’t know dirtier jokes than you do than I, like I think this is the thing. We’re all talking about this already. So you can give them the education that they need to be able to make healthy decisions, but also to be able to help their friends when their friends are not making healthy decisions. You don’t want your kid to be in a position where they have a friend disclose something to them that they don’t realize until the next year was abuse. And then they’re like, I could have helped you a year ago. I could have spoken up. You don’t want your kid to be weighing that on their shoulders. This stuff matters, not just because we want our own kids to have the information that they need for themselves. It also matters because we live in community and we’re supposed to care for each other and help each other. And if your kids’ friends are doing things that your kids are hopefully not at the age of 14, 15, it still really benefits them to know. because they can help other people as well. So I would say that. I know a lot of parents are really scared about talking about this stuff with their kids, but
Devi (she/her):
Well, I think often they’re scared about the people who are delivering the information right? Because often they don’t have control over who gives the sex ad. But Sheila, what would you say in that context? Like, it’s still, I imagine it is still worth it.
Sheila:
But let’s say that you have someone talking to your children and the thing that they always worry about is LGBTQ, right? Let’s say
Devi (she/her):
Yeah.
Sheila :
that you have them saying something that you don’t agree with.
Rebecca:
So what? They have to learn that, like help other people.
Sheila:
They still need to learn to help other people, but you can still talk to your children. If they’re saying, have sex. You know, sex is great, just explore, do all these things. Here’s how to masturbate. You can still talk to your children at home. Like, it doesn’t really matter. And your children still have to learn to respect other people. Yes. That’s the big thing. Your kids still have to learn to respect other people. And your kids still have to learn what safety looks like and what abuse looks like. And that is something that people get from sex ed. I had a woman contact me on Instagram. So her family had a youth pastor live with them when she was 13. And the youth pastor groomed her and ended up sexually abusing her, not through intercourse, but through forced oral sex and manual stimulation. And she said she knew what intercourse was, but she didn’t know the other things. And so she didn’t know that other people did those other things. She thought that was something that only they had ever done. and she didn’t know that this was actually a thing that people did and that this was abusive. And she says if she had the words for what was being done to her, she could have spoken up, but she didn’t know that this was a thing. And so I just think our kids are going to learn it anyway. And it is empowering for our kids to hear it. I think one of the other reasons is we’re afraid, if our 11-year-old knows what masturbation is, she’s going to masturbate. Well, there’s not necessarily a lot of proof for that. But also, chances are she’s going to anyway.
Rebecca: Yeah, the rates are pretty high, even among girls in high school. Like by the end of high school, most girls masturbate.
Sheila: And so if we, but if you don’t tell her about it, there’s gonna be a lot more shame.
Rebecca: Well, and not only that, she’s so much more, she’s so much more at risk to people who can like utilize her naivete against her too, right? Like no matter what it is, even if you don’t like the person it’s coming from or the perspective, you know, first of all, we also heard from a lot of people in our focus groups, their parents had no idea what they were going through. You might think this stuff doesn’t apply to my kid. It might. Do you want to take the risk that if the stuff applies to your kid, they don’t have the information and they have to figure it out through experimentation or looking at pornography? Is that what like, is that like, there is a level where like, understanding the education aspect is something that doesn’t force kids to start acting any. like acting sexually earlier, it really doesn’t. If anything, better sex education, all kinds of sex education, every single type of sex education is related to, you know, actually less sexual promiscuity in high school.
Sheila: Because it raises self-esteem and people with higher self-esteem do fewer risky behaviors. But there’s two things that I think parents absolutely need to tell their kids, okay?
Devi (she/her):
Yeah.
Sheila:
The two things that kids absolutely need to know. One is that women orgasm too. And… Because everyone knows the man orgasms because that’s how babies are made. He has to, right?
Devi (she/her):
Yeah.
Sheila :
But an awful lot of women, I think it’s close to 40%, did not realize that women orgasmed until after the age of 18, until
Devi (she/her):
Wow.
Sheila:
after they were 18 years old. And the younger you are when you realize that women can orgasm as well, the more likely you are to reach orgasm once you’re married.
Devi (she/her):
Wow.
Sheila:
So it’s just protective. And also, then you give kids the expectation that sex is pleasurable for both. When we picture sex as something where the man orgasms, then your conception of sex from your very first time you think about is something that he does to her that he gets pleasure from and she just lies
there. And so it’s really important when we explain it to explain it that way. The other thing that it’s so vital for kids to know is about arousal non-concordance. And what that means is that you can have a situation where your body is aroused by something that your mind is freaked out about and doesn’t want to do. So this can happen during sexual assault, for instance. So you’ve said no, it’s a date rape situation. You’ve said no, you don’t wanna do it. He’s forcing you, he’s pressuring you, but then you start to get turned on, he ends up raping you and you think you consented because you were turned on, even though you had said no.
Devi (she/her):
Yep.
Sheila:
And that’s really common. There’s actually several books that we read which described losing their purity in that way. Yeah.
Devi (she/her):
Their words
Sheila:
Where they had said no, they were being forced
being forced, but they got turned on and so they felt like they consented and that’s what’s being portrayed in the books. The other time arousal non-concordance really plays a role in our kids’ lives is through pornography. Yes. So kids see porn for the first time, they get aroused because it is designed to arouse you, but at the same time they’re grossed out by it, right? Cause a lot of porn is very violent, it’s very strange, it’s, you know, and so they think I am a freak. because I got turned on by this.
Rebecca: Or they think I’m violent. Or they think I must be, there’s something broken in me because why did that turn me on? Because it was so scary, why did it turn me on? Mm-hmm. Right?
Sheila: And so just teaching kids that if you get turned on by porn, it doesn’t mean that you’re a porn addict. It doesn’t mean that you like that stuff. That’s what porn is designed to do. But here’s some ways that we can make porn less likely and help you not be drawn towards it. And that a really important conversation, given how young kids are when they often get into porn these days.
Devi (she/her):
Yeah, that’s so good. I think let’s end on that. I think that’s a really, let me just stop here. That’s a really good…